Favorite films

It’s interesting that the most revered science fiction film since the medium’s inception is one that is so cold. When we look at 2001 we see Kubrick study humanity from its ape ancestry to the farthest reaches of future space travel. It is a commentary on humanity as a whole and asks far more questions than it answers. This it seems is a good thing. It’s paved the way for countless dissections of the film and it is as highly…

How much can you give a film points for effort and still hold it to the same standards as its contemporaries? That’s the question I kept asking myself when I was watching The Babadook. It’s certainly an achievement that this micro-budget film got made at all (the primary source of funding was a Kickstarter campaign), but can we forgive this film of its shortcomings because of this fact and still give it the same recognition we would give films that…

Christopher Nolan is a director that works in big swooping ideas and is always attempting to ground those ideas in a human truth and a sense of the tactile. He took the Batman franchise and contextualized it by setting in a world we live in, or a world we could perceive as real. With this modus operandi Nolan seems to divide movie going audiences. Some of the criticism aimed at him seems valid and some seems a little disproportioned. Nolan…

There’s an extended dance sequence in Prom Night that really speaks to the essence of the film. The scene is long, beautifully lit and wholly extraneous. The motivation for the scene is Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) trying make her high school nemesis Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin) envious of her relationship with Nick (Casey Stevens). The scene plays like a scene from Saturday Night Fever, it’s well-rehearsed, well executed but inherently bizarre. In a genre that would usually have us move from…